OpenAI Just Killed Sora, and It’s All Anthropic’s Fault |
OpenAI Just Killed Sora, and It’s All Anthropic’s Fault
OpenAI’s decision to end support for its AI video-generator app is about moving forward and beating the competition.
BY BEN SHERRY, STAFF REPORTER @BENLUCASSHERRY
Illustration: Courtesy OpenAI
On Tuesday afternoon, the official X account for Sora, OpenAI’s video-generation app, announced that the platform was shutting down. “We’re saying goodbye to the Sora app,” the company wrote, adding that timelines for when the service will cease will be coming soon. The app was launched just six months ago, in September.
“We’ve decided to discontinue Sora in the consumer app and API,” an OpenAI spokesperson told Inc. “As we focus and compute demand grows, the Sora research team continues to focus on world simulation research to advance robotics that will help people solve real-world, physical tasks.”
A contingent of the internet celebrated the news of Sora’s demise. “The death of generative ai has finally started and its gonna be so unbelievably satisfying to watch it all burn” one post with over 350,000 views said on X. Some accounts praised new Disney CEO Josh D’Amaro after the company announced that it had pulled out of its previously announced billion-dollar deal to bring Mickey Mouse and friends into Sora.
In reality, the imminent death of generative AI has likely been greatly exaggerated. According to OpenAI, the decision to shut down Sora is largely about asset allocation. Put simply: OpenAI can’t afford to waste GPUs (the chips that enable the training and usage of AI models) on distractions like AI video, especially when the company is largely focused on beating back its main rival, Anthropic, in the enterprise space.
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In some respect, the writing had been on the wall for Sora. On March 16, The Wall Street Journal reported that during an all-hands meeting, OpenAI CEO of applications Fidji Simo told staff that the company would be dropping some projects that she referred to as “side quests” in order to refocus around AI-generated coding and growing its enterprise business.
As the largest name in the AI world, OpenAI has its hands in a lot of different pies. The company has recently released internet browser ChatGPT Atlas, is actively working on a line of hardware products, and has reportedly been developing a music generation model.
While OpenAI was branching out, Anthropic remained laser-focused on improving the coding capabilities of its Claude AI models. Unlike AI-generated video, automated coding has clear economic implications. As a result, business use of Anthropic’s models has grown dramatically in recent months.